Mathilde Niel, The Phenomenon of Technology:
Liberation or Alienation of Man?

334

V. ON PRACTICE

Norman Thomas, Humanistic Socialism
and the Future

347

Wolfgang Abendroth, Planning
and the Classless Society

358

Richard M. Titmuss, Social Welfare
and the Art of Giving

377

T. B. Bottomore, Industry, Work, and
Socialism

393

Sir Stephen King‑Hall, Personal
Liberty in an Affluent Society

403

Paul Medow, The Humanistic Ideals of
the Enlightenment and Mathematical Economics

405

Danilo Dolci, Reflections on Planning
and Groups, Decentralization and Planning

418

Galvano della Volpe, The Legal Philosophy
of Socialism

425

The Triple Revolution

441

INTRODUCTION

One of the most remarkable phenomena
of the past decade has been the renascence of Humanism in various ideological
systems. Humanism—in simplest terms, the belief in the unity of the human race
and man’s potential to perfect himself by his own efforts—has had a long and
varied history stretching back to the Hebrew prophets and the Greek philosophers.
Terentius’ statement, “I believe that nothing human is alien to me,” was an
expression of the Humanist spirit, echoed centuries later by Goethe’s “Man carries
within himself not only his individuality but all of humanity, with all its
potentialities, although he can realize these potentialities in only a limited
way because of the external limitations of his individual existence.”

Over the ages some Humanists
have believed in the innate goodness of man or the existence of God, while others
have not. Some Humanist thinkers—among them Leibniz, Goethe, Kierkegaard, and
Marx­—particularly stressed the need to develop individuality to the greatest
possible extent in order to achieve the highest harmony and universality. But
all Humanists have shared a belief in the possibility of man’s perfectibility,
which, whether they believed in the need for God’s grace or not, they saw as
dependent upon man’s own efforts (which is why Luther was not a Humanist). Nonreligious
Humanists like Gianbattista Vico and Karl Marx carried this further to say that
man makes his own history and is his own creator.

Because Humanists believe in
the unity of humanity and have faith in the future of man, they have never been
fanatics. After the Reformation they saw the limitations of both the Catholic
and the Protestant positions, because they judged not from the narrow angle
of one particular organization or power group, but from the vantage point of
humanity. Humanism has always emerged as a reaction to a threat to mankind:
in the Renaissance, to the threat of religious fanaticism; in the Enlightenment,
to extreme nationalism and the enslavement of man by the machine and economic
interests. The revival of Humanism today is a new reaction to this latter threat
in a more intensified form—the fear that man may become the slave of things,
the prisoner of circumstances he himself has created—and the wholly new threat
to mankind’s physical existence posed by nuclear weapons.

This reaction is being felt
in all camps—Catholic, Protestant, Marxist, liberal. This does not mean, however,
that contemporary Humanists are willing to forego their specific philosophical
or religious convictions for the sake of “better understanding,” but rather
that, as Humanists, they believe they can reach the clearest understanding of
different points of view from the most precise expression of each, always bearing
in mind that what matters most is the human reality behind the concepts.

This volume is an attempt to
present the ideas of one branch of contemporary Humanism. Socialist Humanism
differs in an important respect from other branches. Renaissance and Enlightenment
Humanism believed that the task of transforming man into a fully human being
could be achieved exclusively or largely by education. Although Renaissance
Utopians touched upon the need for social changes, the socialist Humanism of
Karl Marx was the first to declare that theory cannot be separated from practice,
knowledge from action, spiritual aims from the social system. Marx held that
free and independent man could exist only in a social and economic system that,
by its rationality and abundance, brought to an end the epoch of “prehistory”
and opened the epoch of “human history,” which would make the full development
of the individual the condition for the full development of society, and vice
versa. Hence he devoted the greater part of his life to the study of capitalist
economics and the organization of the working class in the hopes of instituting
a socialist society that would be the basis for the development of a new Humanism.

Marx believed that the working
class would lead in the transformation of society because it was at once the
most dehumanized and alienated class, and potentially the most powerful, since
the functioning of society depended upon it. He did not foresee the development
of capitalism to the point where the working class would prosper materially
and share in the capitalist spirit while all of society would become alienated
to an extreme degree. He never became aware of that affluent alienation which
can be as dehumanizing as impoverished alienation.

Stressing the need for a change
in the economic organization and for transferring control of the means of production
from private (or corporate) bands into the bands of organized producers, Marx
was misinterpreted both by those who felt threatened by his program, and by
many socialists. The former accused him of caring only for the physical, not
the spiritual, needs of man. The latter believed that his goal was exclusively
material affluence for all, and that Marxism differed from capitalism only in
its methods, which were economically more efficient and could be initiated by
the working class. In actuality, Marx's ideal was a man productively related
to other men and to nature, who would respond to the world in an alive manner,
and who would be rich not because he had much but because be was much.

Marx was seeking an answer to
the meaning of life, but could not accept the traditional religious answer that
this can be found only through belief in the existence of God. In this he belongs
to the same tradition as the Enlightenment thinkers, from Spinoza to Goetbe,
who rejected the old theological concepts and were searching for a new spiritual
frame of orientation. But, unlike such socialists as Jean Jaurés, Lunacharsky, Gorki, and Rosa Luxemburg, who permitted themselves to deal more explicitly
with the question of the spiritual, Marx shied away from a direct discussion
of the problem because he wanted to avoid any compromise with religious or idealistic
ideologies, which he considered harmful.

Authentic Marxism was perhaps
the strongest spiritual movement of a broad, nontheistic nature in nineteenth-century
Europe. But after 1914—or even before—most of this spirit disappeared. Many
different factors were involved, but the most important were the new affluence
and ethics of consumption that began to dominate capitalist societies in the
period between the wars and immediately following the second and the seesawing
pattern of destructiveness and suffering caused by two world wars. Today, the
questions of the meaning of life and man's goal in living have emerged again
as questions of primary importance.

One must realize that, by necessity,
the spiritual problem has been camouflaged to a large extent until our present
moment in history. As long as productive forces were not highly developed, the
necessity to work, and to keep alive, gave sufficient meaning to life. This
still holds true for the vast majority of the human race, even those living
in industrially developed countries where the mixture of work and leisure, and
the dream of ever‑increasing consumption, keeps man from realizing his
true human potential, of being what he could be. But we are moving rapidly toward
a fully industrialized, automated world in which the ten‑ or twenty‑hour
work week will be standard, and where the many material satisfactions provided
for everyone will be taken for granted. In this totally affluent society (which
will be a planned if not a socialist one), man’s spiritual problem will become
much more acute and urgent than it has ever been in the past.

This volume has a dual purpose.
It seeks to clarify the problems of Humanist socialism in its various theoretical
aspects, and to demonstrate that socialist Humanism is no longer the concern
of a few dispersed intellectuals, but a movement to be found throughout the
world, developing independently in different countries. In this volume many
Humanist socialists from the East and the West meet for the first time. Reading
the volume, contributors as well as readers may become fully aware for the first
time of the common response of many socialists to what the history of the past
decades and the present threat to the physical and spiritual survival of mankind
has taught them.

With five exceptions, all of
the contributions were written specifically for this volume, but in no case
did I suggest the topic of a specific essay to the author. I preferred to ask
each of them to write on any topic that appeared most important to him within
the general frame of reference of socialist Humanism. I hoped that in this way
the volume would represent the main interests of Humanist socialists. It did
not seem to me a disadvantage if some topics were dealt with several times by
different authors. On the contrary, I thought it would be an interesting and
even impressive phenomenon to see the fundamental agreement among most authors
represented in this volume and the extent to which a new school of thinking
has arisen in various parts of the world, in particular among the scholars of
Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, whose writings have so far been little known
in the English‑speaking world.

Despite the authors’ common
bond, there are important disagreements among them and with the editor. The
authors belong to different political parties. Most of them are socialists,
but some are not. Most of them are Marxists, but some—­including Catholics,
independent liberals, and non‑Marxist labor party members—are not. No
one whose contribution is published here can be held responsible for the views expressed by any other author or by the editor.

As Humanists, all of the contributors
have a common concern with man and the full unfolding of his potentialities,
and a critical attitude toward political reality, especially toward ideologies.
This latter is of the utmost importance. Today, more than ever, we find concepts
like freedom, socialism, humanism, and God used in an alienated, purely ideological
way, regardless of who uses them. What is real in them is the word, the sound,
not a genuine experience of what the word is supposed to indicate. The contributors
are concerned with the reality of human existence, and hence are critical
of ideology; they constantly question whether an idea expresses the reality
or hides it.

There is one other factor common
to all the contributors: their conviction that the most urgent task for mankind
today is the establishment of peace. No one represented in this volume in any
way supports the cold war.

Inevitably there are omissions,
which the editor regrets. Most of the authors are either European or North American,
even though Asia, Africa, and Australia are represented. There is also a rather
one‑sided emphasis on the philosophical aspect of socialist Humanism as
compared to the practical and empirical problems of Humanist socialist organization,
which are dealt with only in the last chapter, On the Practice of Socialist
Humanism. Indeed, a great number of important problems of socialist
organization are not only not represented here, but have been little discussed
in socialist literature in general. (Such problems are, for instance, the distinction
between real human needs and artificially produced needs, the possibility of
a revival of handicrafts as a luxury industry, new forms of democratic participation
based on small face‑to‑face groups, etc.)

To sum up: it is perhaps no
exaggeration to say that never in the past hundred years have there been such
widespread and intensive studies of the problem of Humanist socialism as today.
To demonstrate this phenomenon and show some of the results of these studies
are the purposes of this volume. In this concern for man and opposition to dehumanization
we feel a deep sense of solidarity with all Humanists, many of whom do not share
all of our views, but all of whom share our concern for the full development
of man.

I wish to thank all those who
have helped me in my editorial task. I have often turned to Thomas B. Bottomore
of the London School of Economics and Gajo Petrović of the University of
Zagreb for advice, and they have always been most generous in their response.
I am grateful to the contributors for responding so cooperatively to my suggestions
about space and organization, and to the translators for taking on the difficult
job of putting complicated manuscripts in French, German, Italian, Polish, and
Serbo‑Croat into English. Finally my sincere thanks to Anne Freedgood
of Doubleday for her ever‑present interest in this book and for her extraordinary
effort in preparing the manuscript.